Tag: march 2018

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Recap: Stock Market Crash

Editor’s rating: ★★☆☆☆

Here’s the most surprising thing about Gianni Versace: Even at the age of 10 in Calabria, Italy, he apparently spoke fluent English. He and his mother only speak English to each other, as does his Latin teacher at school and the one classmate who calls him a pansy. This must be an especially good school district, since it teaches English so well that Italians would prefer to speak it at home rather than their native tongue.

I’m teasing the show, of course, but how hard would it have been to translate the two scenes of Versace’s childhood into Italian and put in subtitles? Yes, I know we are all lazy and hate to read while we’re watching TV because it makes us look up from crushing unspeakable amounts of candy on our phone screens, but come on.

While we’re talking about unbelievable things, one of the jocks at Andrew’s school called him a “fag” for yelling in line at school picture day, but we’re really supposed to believe that no one would say anything when he shows up to a house party vogueing on the dance floor in a red leather jumpsuit like he’s Michael Jackson in the “Bad” music video? It’s appropriate that the house party was in 1987, because no house parties are as cool, crowded, or well-behaved, except for the ones in John Hughes movies that were coming out around the same time. Oh, and what happened to that nerdy blonde guy who was going to ask Andrew out? He just disappeared, poor guy. He was just like Duckie in Pretty in Pink.

This episode is called “Creator/Destroyer,” but we get much more of the destroyer than we do the creator. It opens with Gianni sketching dresses in his mother’s atelier and her encouraging his love of fashion as a young boy, but she does it with the kind of platitudes that are usually reserved for motivational posters in sad cubicle farms. “You must do what you love, but it takes hard work and practice.” “Success only comes with hard work. And it’s never easy. And that’s why it’s special.” This opening is more like a Lifetime movie than it is a prestige show on an Emmy-winning cable network.

While the language and dialogue are rather silly, the worst part about this entire episode is that it lasts 90 minutes (with commercials). I’m all for cable channels letting their creators experiment with run times, but no one exploits this privilege like Ryan Murphy and his crew. “Creator/Destroyer” is boring, slack, and full of exposition that we didn’t really need.

Yes, there are lots of good parts, but did we need to see Lizzie talking to Andrew on the couch about how they’re both imposters? No. Did we need Andrew and his father saluting over the American flag in the front yard? No. Did we really need all those cringey moments of Andrew getting his yearbook photo taken and then crowing about it to his one friend we previously hadn’t met? No. We’re nearing the home stretch, and this needed to be a lot tighter to be more effective.

But we did learn some interesting things, mostly about Andrew’s father. Both Andrew and his father never felt like they belonged in the all-white, upper-class world to which they aspired, but Modesto (a.k.a. Pete) taught Andrew to fit in. While Versace’s mother taught him about hard work and persistence, Andrew’s father taught him “to remember that you’re special, and when you feel special, success will follow.” Both Andrew and Modesto felt special, but when success didn’t follow, they both got angry and became violent, thieving liars.

The best and most heated scene comes when Andrew finally tracks his father down to Manila after he’s fled the Feds for bilking old ladies out of their pensions. Andrew is crushed that his father’s success was all lies, that the superiority he based his personality on was all a sham. “You’re not upset that I stole, you’re upset that I stopped,” Modesto says. “Now you have to work. You are a sissy kid with a sissy mind.” He then spits on Andrew and tells him to stab his father with a knife to prove that he’s a man.

Maybe that is the essential difference between Andrew and Gianni. The show has taken great pains to paint them almost as equals — very intelligent, artistic, gifted, and bullied for being gay — but Andrew had a father who used his sexuality against him, whereas Gianni’s mother trained him to be a couturier regardless of what she thought it would say about her son.

The oddest thing about this hour, and the series in general, is that it seems to be suggesting this all wasn’t Andrew’s fault. It keeps trying and trying to make us feel sympathy for a man who killed multiple people in cold blood. Here, Andrew has a father who raised him with the wrong values and made him feel better than everyone else, even his long suffering older siblings. His father also taught him that lying and stealing were the only way to get ahead in America. Andrew was given the education and refinement to reach the upper echelons of society, but not the work ethic to make it stick (something that Norman brought up when they fought on the balcony of his house).

Does that mean that Andrew couldn’t help but become who he was, because he was a sensitive gay kid born to the wrong parents and living in a homophobic world? That can’t be the answer because no one forced him to become violent. Killing all of those people was his choice and he needs to be held accountable for that. Yes, the portrait of every killer might be more nuanced than the nightly news would lead us to believe, but there are plenty of people who escape troubled backgrounds without resorting to spree killing, so why couldn’t Andrew? Maybe next week’s finale will do a little bit more to tarnish the image the show has given him so far.

That’s the big question, isn’t it? After his confrontation with his father in Manila, Andrew says, “I will never be like you,” so what turned him into exactly the kind of person that Modesto was? We see it a little bit at the pharmacy, where he’s filling out a job application and the Filipino owner starts asking about his father. Andrew initially lies out of a sense of survival, because he feels like he won’t get the job if the owner knows that his father is a crook. But then his sense of superiority is dinged and he starts telling the owner that his father owns multiple pineapple plantations. It’s the very start of a road that will lead right to Versace’s front door.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace Recap: Stock Market Crash

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Introduces the Most Influential Person in Andrew Cunanan’s Life

Tonight’s episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story centered on Andrew Cunanan’s origin story. Spanning several years in Andrew’s early life, from childhood through to his late teens, “Creator/Destroyer” explores his formative relationship with his doting-yet-abusive father, Modesto “Pete” Cunanan. The elder Cunanan is played by actor Jon Jon Briones, who, in the space of just one episode, turns in one of the series’ most mesmerizing, frightening performances.

Modesto’s obsession with building a successful life in America at all costs gave him the drive to land a job at Merrill Lynch against the odds, but—as the episode portrays—also drove him to commit massive financial fraud. When he’s discovered, he flees the country, leaving his wife and children with nothing. But before all that, he dotes on Andrew to an alarming degree while ignoring his other children and openly abusing his wife, all of which fuels Andrew’s sense of entitlement and his instability.

For this week’s recap, Briones spoke to BAZAAR.com about Modesto’s psychology, the lack of complex roles for Asian actors in Hollywood, and working with Darren Criss on that extraordinary final scene.

On his astonishment when he first encountered the role:

“To tell you the truth, when I first read the script, I immediately thought ‘is this really written for an Asian actor?’ There are, truthfully, not a lot of roles for Asian actors that are written with this much complexity, or that offer such a rich story. I had to calm myself down, because I was putting a lot of pressure on myself when I first read it. This is one of the biggest, meatiest roles I’ve ever read for an Asian actor, so I felt a real responsibility to do it justice.

"Before this, I was getting offered a tiny role for a terrorist, or drug dealer, or the guy behind the counter. There’s still a lot to be done, but I’m hoping that my performance might open up some minds a little bit in Hollywood, because there are a lot of amazing actors that could have done this role, but they just don’t get the opportunities.”

On what he focused on to understand Modesto:

“What really stood out to me was that this guy is an immigrant who came from very small means and is essentially self-taught; he put himself through school and got into Merrill Lynch, back in the days when it was just Caucasian Ivy League graduates. He’s an amazing man, in many ways, but he’s also hugely flawed and delusional. His pursuit of the American Dream is so intense, and in the end his single-mindedness was his downfall.“

"I’m a father, and I can understand loving your child, but his love is like it’s on steroids. In a way, it’s like he replaced his wife with Andrew. When the family moved into a bigger house, we see him bringing Andrew in, showing him the master bedroom, instead of bringing his wife in and introducing her to it, like ‘This is our house.’ It was all about Andrew. I think it came from pure love, but in a twisted, twisted way.

"Playing the abuse was hard. I understand it, and I know where it came from for the character—he just wanted success more than anything, and more than anyone. So when he doesn’t get his way, or when it’s not how he envisioned it, the frustration is like a volcano erupting.”

“I’ve always been a big fan of Darren’s, but to act with him up close was amazing; he’s such a giving actor. We rehearsed that scene a huge amount, we walked through it— myself, Darren, Matt and the first AD [assistant director]—and blocked it out ahead of time. He let us just move around the space, feel it out, and so it was like doing a play. When we actually came to film it, there was such a flow to our movements that the emotions would just explode from us. The lighting in that scene was so surreal, too; it reminded m a little bit of that "horror” scene in Apocalypse Now between Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen.“

On Matt Bomer, who made his directorial debut with this episode:

"He is amazing. I can’t believe that this was his first directorial gig, considering his understanding of the material and his preparedness. I was grateful that he’s also an actor, because he understood the insecurities of actors. This was the biggest on-screen role that I’ve ever done, so I felt a lot of pressure to deliver, and every time we would cut Matt would come out of the monitor village to give me encouragement. Also: he’s so talented, he’s so nice, and he looks like that?!”

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Introduces the Most Influential Person in Andrew Cunanan’s Life

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 8: Prince Andrew

Episode 8: ‘Creator/Destroyer’

The penultimate episode of “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story” is a remarkable hour of television. It is a parallel portrait of two childhoods: those of Versace, the renowned fashion designer, and Andrew Cunanan, the serial killer who shot him to death in 1997. It is a parallel portrait of a father and son: Modesto Cunanan and his darling youngest child, Andrew. And it is a rare, nuanced depiction of an Asian American family that finds heartbreak, not fulfillment, in its pursuit of the American dream.

The episode seems to offer some of the missing pieces of an explanation for Cunanan’s murderous pathology. It is such a masterly hour of drama that I’m tempted to say our patience has been rewarded. Yet, for reasons I’ll explain, I felt somewhat shortchanged: One hour of great television can only do so much to make up for hours of grisly and often hard-to-watch violence. This series has been told in reverse chronological order, putting tremendous weight on the final two episodes to explain the chaos and bloodshed we’ve experienced in the first seven.

The episode begins pleasantly enough. We learn that Versace, growing up in Calabria in austere postwar Italy, was encouraged by his mother, herself a dressmaker, to follow his dreams.

“I see you watching me work,” she gently little Gianni. “There is no need to hide.”

She explains that she wanted to be a doctor as a child, but that her father discouraged her. “You must do what you love, Gianni, what you feel inside here,” she tells her son, tapping his chest. With that encouragement — and in spite of homophobic mocking by a teacher — Gianni begins his rise, one grounded in technical virtuosity and boldness of vision.

Andrew Cunanan’s early years, we learn, were in most respects considerably more complicated.

It is 1980 and the Cunanan family — Modesto (played by a fantastic Jon Jon Briones), who is Filipino; his wife, Mary Ann; and their four children — are moving into a spacious new home in San Diego. Andrew turned 11 that summer. Modesto leads his youngest child — whom an older brother calls “Prince Andrew” — on a tour of the new house. He is given the master bedroom. It is clear that his parents have marked him as special, and not just in the way youngest children are often doted on.

As Andrew interviews for the Bishop’s School, an elite private academy, Modesto interviews at Merrill Lynch. Modesto’s charm is on full display. “Gentlemen, I’m aware that you have a long line of eager Ivy League-educated young men queuing up to be brokers at Merrill Lynch, but ask yourself, how many of them started from nothing?” he asks. When asked to discuss business, not his biography, he protests: “My life is a tale told in dollars,” he tells them, which started in a small village in the Philippines and wound up in an $80,000 home.

“Now is that biography or business?” he asks. “Because I will tell your investors that’s what I plan to do with their money. I will cross oceans with it. I will take it to new lands. I’m talking about growth they can’t imagine.” The monologue is notable because it is so much like the fantastic tales that Andrew will later tell to the many gay men he will try to impress. Modesto gets the job.

Young Andrew, meanwhile, is accepted to the Bishop’s School, after telling the interviewers that his one wish is “to be special.”

It is a high point for the father and son, whose lives start to go down from this point.

But first we learn about the family’s unusual and troubling dynamics. Modesto spoils Andrew to the point of buying a car for him, even though he is too young for a license. Even more troubling, Modesto is physically abusive to his wife, Mary Ann, whom he holds in contempt for her “weak mind.” And his obsession with Andrew is clearly unhealthy. In one particularly disturbing scene at bed time, there’s an intimation of possible sexual abuse. The scene goes dark, and we’re left to wonder. But the effect is unsettling regardless.

Flash forward a few years, to 1987: Andrew is 17 and finishing high school, and he has carved out an identity for himself: flamboyant, exuberant and carefree. Despite a homophobic taunt, he unbuttons his shirt for a school photo. He is determined not to conform. In his high school yearbook, he is voted “most likely to be remembered.” Under his photo is the slogan, “Après moi, le déluge.”

Modesto is meanwhile in serious trouble. Having left Merrill Lynch (presumably for underperforming, as is hinted at in earlier scenes), he now works for a smaller stockbroker, where he is accused of trying to fleece a 90-year-old woman of her life savings. F.B.I. agents arrive at his office; Modesto escapes out the back and races home. He runs upstairs, pries open a floorboard, grabs cash and passports and puts them in a bag. When Mary Ann asks what is happening, he violently shoves her aside. As agents enter the house from the front, Modesto again flees out the back, climbing over a wall … where he encounters Andrew.

“Don’t believe a word they say,” Modesto tells Andrew as he takes his son’s car and flees to the Philippines.

Convinced that Modesto must have stored money away somewhere, Andrew flies to Manila, and — in the most stunning scene of this series so far — confronts his father in what is essentially a tree-canopy-covered shack in the village where Modesto is living.

The father puts down the newspaper he is reading and offers his son another in a long line of fraudulent smiles. “I knew you’d come,” he tells Andrew, as if selling him a used car.

Asked where the money is, Modesto spins again, insisting that there are “millions” but “out of reach.” Later in the night, Andrew wakes up and confronts his father. He knows that there is no money. “My father’s a thief,” he laments. Modesto lashes back:

Andrew is crushed. “You were everything to me, dad,” he says. “But if you’re a lie, then I’m a lie, and I can’t be a lie.” He bursts into tears, but Modesto won’t have it. “Weak, just like your mother,” he sneers. “The two of you talk about honesty, but she never cared that I was stealing as long as there was money.”

He slaps Andrew, spits in his face. Andrew grabs a knife, but he can’t use it. Instead he cuts himself, as he agonizes and holds himself back.

Back in California, Andrew applies for a job a drugstore. When the owner — a Filipino immigrant like Modesto — asks Andrew what his father does, he replies: “He owns multiple pineapple plantations. As far as the eye can see.” And so begins the big lie.

It’s remarkable television, evoking everything from the Madoff scandal (which also destroyed a son) to the dashed aspirations of “Death of a Salesman.” It reveals the dark side of the 1980s, when greed and fraud operated under the veneer of pastels and sunshine. It exposes, to an extent, the myth of the “model minority” that has hobbled Asian-Americans, and of the notion that hard work is all the American dream requires.

It is not, however, an entirely plausible explanation for how Andrew Cunanan became a mass murderer. I’m looking to the season finale to see if this series means to give us one.

‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace’ Episode 8: Prince Andrew

Versace: How Andrew Cunanan’s Father Figured Into the Murderer’s “Breaking Point”

Was Andrew Cunanan born or made a serial killer? This is the question that American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace poses with Wednesday’s episode, “Creator/Destroyer,” when it flashes back to Cunanan’s childhood and his relationship with father Modesto “Pete” Cunanan—a stockbroker who abandoned the family after allegedly “misappropriating” $106,000 when Andrew was a college freshman. (The episode contrasts Cunanan’s youth with Gianni Versace’s childhood, showing how the fashion designer was raised by a dressmaker mother in Reggio Calabria, Italy, who—because her parents had quashed her own childhood ambition of becoming a doctor—was determined to nurture her son’s professional dreams.)

Up until this episode, Cunanan has been a confounding character study—equally proud and lazy, a pathological liar who was capable of occasional generosity before his descent into drug use and murder. According to series writer and executive producer Tom Rob Smith, though, the key to understanding Cunanan’s trajectory is his father, who provided the template.

“I don’t think you can understand Andrew without understanding his dad,” Smith told Vanity Fair earlier this year. “His mom is a key figure, too, but his dad really offers the template for Andrew’s life. His dad had this spectacular rise—he came to America from the Philippines and served in the U.S. Navy. I think he worked through night college to get his trader’s license and got this extraordinary job working at Merrill Lynch in San Diego. It was this amazing ascent, and then he burnt out.”

According to Vanity Fair contributor Maureen Orth, whose book Vulgar Favors: the Assassination of Gianni Versace is the basis for American Crime Story, Pete had a special relationship with the youngest of his four children.

“Of all the children Pete has, he put so much attention toward Andrew, maybe because he thought Andrew was so good-looking,” Andrew’s godfather Delfin Labao told Orth. “It was not healthy. His father spoiled Andrew, made him feel he’s got to be somebody and, maybe that rang a bell in his uncertain mind, that that was what life was about.”

In addition to instilling that expectation, Pete embedded his son with bravado, materialism, and, even if Andrew didn’t realize it at the time, the compulsion of a pathological liar.

“By seventh grade, Andrew had developed a line of patter and a penchant for telling stories based on what he had read, and embellished for effect,” reported Orth. “The disturbing grandiosity that would mark his personality had already begun to take hold.”

Andrew was a precocious child and his parents spoiled him—even giving him the family’s master bedroom in high school. (Pete, who had a fraught relationship with his wife, MaryAnn, slept on the couch.) When Andrew was a freshman in high school, Pete even bought Andrew a brand-new sports car after his son was forced to miss an anticipated field trip—to the opera—because he was sick. Andrew was only 14 years old and did not have a driver’s license.

“Andrew, always the con man at school, was himself being conned at home,” wrote Orth. Ronald Johnston, who worked with Pete at four different firms, explained, “Pete always wore expensive suits, would buy expensive cars and expensive homes, and I think Andrew believed that was all for real. Andrew was led to believe by his father that he would attain anything he wanted to attain. And I know his father spoiled him rotten and gave him everything that he could possibly want.”

By the time that Cunanan graduated high school, though, Pete was cycling through a series of jobs and reportedly shady deals to combat his growing debt.

Explained American Crime Story writer Tom Rob Smith: “[Pete] committed what looked to be fraudulent trading activity. He moved down through various trading houses—smaller and smaller ones until he was finally caught. He had all of this fraud that was just circling him, and finally he runs to Manila.”

In 1988, when Cunanan was a freshman in college, Modesto took his cut of a deal that he was putting together, sold his cars and the family’s two “heavily mortgaged homes, and disappeared.” Per Orth, “Their family had literally had their home sold out from under them. MaryAnn was reportedly left with $700… . The experience was clearly shattering for Andrew, whose image of his dad as a powerful and reliable protector was smashed.”

Afterward, Andrew flew to the Philippines and tracked down his father—where he found the person he once believed to be a mythic figure living in squalor.

“When Andrew saw the crude poverty in which his father was living, a driving madness took over his mind,” one of Andrew’s teachers told Orth. Smith also believes that Andrew’s trip to the Philippines was a critical turning point.

“I think at that point, if Andrew had accepted that his dad was a fraud, embraced it on some level, and said, ‘This is what life is … complicated,’ he’d come back to the States having learned from the experience,” said Smith. “He could’ve done something interesting with his life. Instead, he comes back and continues his lies, telling people, ‘My dad is rich,’ and keeping up that pretense. To me, though, that was the break[ing] point in his brain. At that point there’s no going back.”

“Andrew goes through the exact same trajectory as his dad,” explained Smith. “He had his own rise—finding these wealthy affluent-older men that he’s living with. He ended up in a multi-million-dollar condo in La Jolla, this beautiful paradise, [living with Norman Blachford, a man who loved him.] He’s given an allowance. Traveling to the South of France. And he throws it all away because he can’t tolerate the notion that he is a kept man … he leaves and moves into a small place in Hillcrest, and descends through crystal-meth until he’s lost everything.”

Pointing out the similarity of father and son’s arcs, Smith explained, “His dad flees to Manila and restarts his life, but Andrew has nowhere left to go. So he goes to Minneapolis and has a breakdown. When you look at the shapes of their lives, that was absolutely the key of Andrew.”

So how, then, did Cunanan’s father Pete process the news that his son had not only mirrored his descent—he had done so in deadly fashion?

By shopping a documentary that would serve as a star vehicle for himself. Two months after the murders and his son’s suicide, the Los Angeles Times reported that Cunanan’s father Pete had already recruited a Philippines filmmaker, relocated to Los Angeles, and apparently alerted press of the project. Director Amable “Tikoy” Aguiluz VI made it clear that, in spite of Andrew being the focus of the media interest because of the murders, Pete still narcissistically saw himself as the star of the story. “I’m telling [the film] from the father’s point of view—a father who knew Andrew until he was 19—and his discovery of his son all over again,” Aguiluz told the L.A. Times.

As for whether Pete thought his son was guilty of the murders, he told papers, “This was a deep cover-up.” Rather than share sympathy for the victims and their families, he teased a potential F.B.I. conspiracy—“Hopefully, we’ll come up with some plausible explanations when we run the movie.” When speaking to Orth, Pete further revealed that he was asking for $500,000 for the rights to a film and book deal; thought it could make over $100 million at the box office; and even had an actor in mind to play his son.

John F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Their mannerisms are very, very close, almost the same,” Pete explained. “I watch John Junior very carefully. The guy has a lot of moxie in him—that dignity.”

In comparison and retrospect, Cunanan’s oft-told delusion of knowing Gianni Versace suddenly doesn’t seem so far-fetched.

Versace: How Andrew Cunanan’s Father Figured Into the Murderer’s “Breaking Point”

The Assassination of Gianni Versace, episode 3, review – a deft parable of sunlight and darkness

★★★★☆

In The Assassination of Gianni Versace (BBC Two), scriptwriter Tom Rob Smith has set himself quite a task to keep up interest in a story short of redemptive good cheer. The first episodewent off like a glorious gaudy firework. The second delved into the less riveting anxieties of the Versace siblings. Seven more episodes of Gianni and Donatella squabbling might be quite a trial. So in this cheerless parable of sunlight and darkness, a lot rests on the shoulders of the itinerant psychopath Andrew Cunanan, played by the extraordinary Darren Criss.

Last time around we watched him in action as a creepy S&M escort whose specialism was suffocating closeted elderly clients with duct-tape. (Don’t shoot the messenger: I merely report the facts.) The third episode took a holiday from the Versaces to deliver to a well-shaped, self-contained episode from Cunanan’s serial-killing back story. In the words of Blue Peter, it was a case of “here’s a murder I did earlier. Two, in fact.”

The victim was Lee Miglin, a real estate tycoon prone to furtive gay encounters but still devoted to his wife Marilyn, a shopping-network perfume saleswoman. Deftly portrayed by guest actors Mike Farrell and Judith Light, theirs was a lavender marriage based on loving friendship and rigid denial. The denial continued for the unshocked wife even after her husband’s body was found taped and stabbed in the garage. The murder, she ferociously insisted, must be reported as a random robbery gone wrong.

This was a story about appearances. While Marilyn was fixated on keeping up hers (and her dead husband’s), Cunanan was all for exposing ugly realities under polished surfaces. Miglin was ruthlessly taunted for romanticising their sexual transaction. Then his killer ripped off his mask and announced his true identity: “Here I am,” he boasted. “This is me.”

Watching Cunanan enact rituals of sexual humiliation is not a pleasant experience. Later, he also chucked in another more pragmatic, cold-blooded execution on the run. As Cunanan, Darren Criss is horribly convincing, though I’m starting to doubt if he can convince me to spend six more episodes in his company. There are still two more murders to sit through. Come back, Gianni and Donatella. All is forgiven.

The Assassination of Gianni Versace, episode 3, review – a deft parable of sunlight and darkness

Matt Bomer on Making His Directorial Debut in American Crime Story: Versace: ‘Can We Sympathize With a Monster?’

Wednesday’s episode of American Crime Story: Versace marks the directorial debut of actor Matt Bomer, who — at the risk of sounding “so 2018” — says he was “truly blessed” to get to work on the FX drama.

“When Ryan Murphy called and asked me to do this — after I passed out, regained consciousness and said yes — I knew that it was a serious responsibility,” the actor tells TVLine. “I’d been offered directing jobs before, but they were jobs I was also acting in, and I wanted my first directing experience to be the full-meal deal. I wanted to really do it, to be on the location scouts and design meetings and castings and really have the full experience.”

Before stepping behind the camera for his episode’s three-week shoot, Bomer says he read “more than 3,000 pages of material on directing,” met with film and TV directors for guidance, did an intensive at the Director’s Guild of America and shadowed two different directors on three episodes of Versace. To say that he did his homework would be an understatement.

“I wanted the producers to know I was taking this seriously, that they weren’t just putting the camera in the hands of somebody who was just hoping to cruise by,” he says. “I called my representatives who were talking about acting jobs, and I told them, ‘Put everything on hold. This is what I’m doing, this is it.‘”

Bomer’s episode — which airs tonight at 10/9c — chronicles Gianni Versace and Andrew Cunanan’s radically different upbringings, showing how “success brought out the worst in Andrew and the best in Gianni.”

“We want to see [Andrew] as a three-dimensional human being,” Bomer says, “but the real challenge of this episode is: Can we sympathize with a monster and see that he was also a victim? We’re all ultimately responsible for the decisions we make and the actions we take, but this is someone who was near to violence at a very young age, who was treated like a spouse by both his mother and his father. The central question of this episode is: What makes one person a creator and one person a killer?”

Location proved to be another challenge, as the characters’ parallel stories take place in “three different countries and five different cities,” all of which had to be recreated in the Los Angeles area. “And I had two child protagonists for the first half of the episode,” Bomer notes. “I was thrown a lot of the challenges you could have as a director, which I’m actually grateful for, because now I can check those off. When someone says I have to work with a kid, I can say, ‘Been there, done that.’”

Bomer adds, “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to be present for everything. It was very clear in the room when I was casting that Edouard Holdener was the right person to play young Andrew.”

He also praises the work of Jon Jon Briones, the actor playing Andrew’s father, who was first brought to his attention by star Darren Criss and EP/writer Tom Rob Smith. “They’d seen him on Broadway in Miss Saigon,” he recalls. This was a guy who had been doing that show for over 20 years, but he was ready for this experience, and his audition was phenomenal. It’s a testament to Ryan Murphy that he’s willing to take a chance on new people who are ready for the experience and ready to serve the story in the best way possible.”

Speaking of exceptional performances, Bomer says he feels “spoiled” that he had a front-row seat to Criss’ take on Andrew almost from the very beginning. “I knew Darren was a brilliant actor and a great artist, but there were times where I would watch him on camera and it was like he just suddenly was this person,” Bomer recalls. “It was bone-chilling to watch.”

Still, it takes a village to put even a single episode of television together, and Bomer has a laundry list of people to thank: “The director of photography, Simon Dennis, was incredible; Jamie Walker McCall designed that incredible plantation set; Alexis Martin Woodall, what she does in the post department is phenomenal; and Shelly Westerman, who edited the episode, is one of my all-time editing heroes.”

“I was really so lucky to work with Ryan’s people,” Bomer adds. “I’d worked with him for so long [on projects like Glee, American Horror Story and The Normal Heart] that I knew most of the camera crew from other jobs. But the level of professionals you work with in his world are top notch.”

Matt Bomer on Making His Directorial Debut in American Crime Story: Versace: ‘Can We Sympathize With a Monster?’